In my twenties, I lived under the San Diego flight path. Every fifteen minutes or so from six-thirty in the morning until eleven at night, a plane descended over palm trees and skyscrapers. Walk out the door and you’d see a neat silver blade slicing an overlit sky, the flaps opening to let wheels hinge down in what seemed to me an intimate, vulnerable gesture, like looking at the tender belly of a young animal that would grow up to hurt you.
     My apartment was the maid’s quarters in the basement of an old Craftsman a block away from Laurel, the street that incoming pilots use to line up for the sudden dip toward the runway. San Diego’s airport is right next to the bay, with houses and businesses built up to the razor-wire fencing. I kept hearing that, a year or two before I moved in, a plane had overshot the landing. It crossed the surface road and ended up with its nose in the water, or nearly so, or maybe that was only the way people spoke about it. The landlords, a thirtysomething couple who lived on the second floor, said they’d watched passengers evacuate down a big slide. I kept waiting for something similar to happen.
     I found a lot of advantages in the flight path. The vibrations made my stomach feel full, and they reminded me not to eat. My dishes rattled, my books, my few pieces of furniture; sometimes a drinking glass would burst into shards, even when there was no plane overhead. That happened every couple of months, usually while I was standing in front of my dish shelf, thinking I might put together a snack. Each explosion made me feel as if my terrible desire made a difference in the world. I cleaned up the shards and went for a walk or a bike ride.
     Hunger was an exotic, precious thing to me. I stoked it by thinking of food and then reminding myself I owed eleven thousand dollars in hospital bills. I was the secretary at a small children’s book publisher, which sounds like a glamorous job until you are doing it. A couple weeks after I moved into the flight path, my appendix ruptured and was removed in a no-insurance surgery. The procedure made me weak and dizzy; I had to crawl to the bathroom. I got an advance on vacation time to stay home and parcel out painkillers. For that week, nobody had to know I existed.
     The appendix had been a surprise and I didn’t have groceries laid in. My stomach hurt. At first I had no appetite because the surgery shut down all those inner organs. I was glad; it was a jumpstart on something I’d meant to do for a long time. If I woke up and felt too much — pain, hunger, anything — I took a pill and slipped into a lovely nothingness in which even the flight path was something distant, to be observed with a bemused detachment.
     If my hands trembled, I felt alive. If my body ached, I felt powerful, because I embraced the ache. When my stomach hurt, I rubbed it the way the physical therapist had shown me, to loosen the scars that were knitting my gut to my ovaries, intestines, and all parts unseen.
     During the day, I listened to the wife in the apartment between me and my landlords. She was not working because she and her husband were trying for a baby and she was focused on her health, which meant that she did Buns of Steel a couple times of day and then baked cookies and meat while listening to heavy metal radio. Her husband was the engine man on a boat shuttling tourists to Catalina Island. When he came home, the two of them used to run from their kitchen over my bed to their bed and land with a thump, while heavy metal blared. It was worst when the airplanes stopped flying and they were all that I heard.
     It was the end of that week when the bad thing happened. I’d heard the music upstairs, and the running feet, and then the music got louder. And then for hours there was nothing but music, well past two in the morning. I was upset. The planes were loud but they weren’t inconsiderate. Now there was all that screeching, all those drums, and the landlords did nothing because they did not want to lose the rent.
     I got up slowly and dressed, brushed my hair, put on shoes. I went outside and, step by step, climbed the long staircase up from my basement to street level, dragging my hand along the rough stucco wall. By the time I got to the top, my head was swimming and my incision throbbed. The music was loud on the sidewalk and deafening on the porch. I pounded on the front door.
     What happened was like the movies, when someone knocks and a door flies open, as if nobody in movies likes to pull on the knob till it clicks. In real life, that gap of a few inches flooded my mouth with a metallic taste. I wanted to run; I also wanted to go in. Def Leppard wanted someone to pour some sugar on them.
     I pushed the door the rest of the way and I saw everything. Open floor plan, no furniture in the way. There was my neighbor, on the bed, with her legs slopping wide off the edge and her vulva exposed to my view. The vulva was broad and plump and, I thought, glistening among the hair. Women had not started shaving there yet; it glittered with drops of invitation, as I thought at the time.
     My neighbor did not move. She simply lay amid all the noise, ready to receive, or else having just received. Her husband did not seem to be home; he often stayed overnight on Catalina. And who knew what was lurking inside out of sight? In the kitchen, the bathroom — there were still hiding places.
     I stepped back and rang the landlords’ doorbell several times, till they both splat-splatted down on bare feet. I stammered out the story: I didn’t like to make trouble, had endured the music as long as I could — came up — knocked — the door opened, I saw her…The landlord was ready to rush inside, but I said I thought it should be his wife. So he and I waited while she shook the neighbor till she woke, then fell asleep again. She was drunk. The landlady turned off the music — silence, a sudden new pressure in the ears — and got the neighbor some water and dumped it in her face. That was all.
     Later, I received a note from the landlady, who said the neighbor was embarrassed. She was going to apologize to everyone.
     My note from the wife said she and her husband did not want to be known as the noisy neighbors and were planning to move, so there was no point saying anything more about that night to anyone. I supposed she’d told her husband I had complained.
     I wrote back to both of them that I was glad she was safe and had not been attacked or drugged. But by then I’d remembered something. That night, when I’d reached the top of the stairs and walked out onto the street, I almost bumped into a man. I was wobbly from the stairs and not eating and the appendix. The man gave me a look that seemed to last long for after two in the morning, but if he’d done something he might not want me to know about, he decided I did not matter. He kept going, and I forgot he existed until the note.
     Now it felt too late to bring him up. Wasn’t that what the note meant, to keep a secret? Plus, I was ashamed of not having been the one to go inside. I was confused, too, because I had seen a woman so overcome (with pleasure, lust, alcohol), and I had felt nothing but fear for myself.
     I told this story to the next man I dated, and he said that if he’d seen my neighbor spatchcocked open like that, he would have, you know, unh-unh. He had a gesture for this that involved his hips. I thought he was one of the worst people I’d ever known, but I kept seeing him until he took off for Mexico. He said he was leaving so he wouldn’t hurt me, which only an idiot would have believed. I had been with him in order to hurt myself, after all.
     The upstairs neighbors did not move out. They could not find anyplace nearly so nice outside the flight path. They did turn the stereo down a few notches, though.
     Then other sounds got worse. What bothered me most was the refrigerator. It and the stove had been made for an RV, too small to hold anything but two pints of juice and some vegetables, and it was mounted in a cabinet too big for it. At night, the motor vibrated at a high pitch that never varied. Even sleeping behind a partition, even sleeping with somebody else, I heard that sound, and it made me anxious and weepy until I got up, pulled the fridge out of the wall, and unplugged it. I could always pick it up and plug it in again when the planes started up in the morning, but sometimes I forgot, and I lost my food. I considered this an advantage, because it meant I could not eat until I shopped, and I did not have the money to buy things every day.
     The scar on my abdomen became a fat pink worm, puckering the flesh around as it stuck to places deeper inside me. I used to pet it like a talisman.
 

*

 

Twenty or so years before I rented the apartment, someone had tried to make the place look larger by adding mirrors everywhere. This was another help to me. If I felt like eating, I could take off my clothes and stand in front of the closet, which took up an entire wall and had three sliding mirrored doors. A plane passed and my reflection shivered, horrified at the sight of itself.
     If that wasn’t enough to help me, the bathroom was tiled in mirrored panels with the faux-antique gold spotting that was popular in the 1970s. There my reflection looked as if it had been run over, marked, crushed with its own worthlessness. I turned around and imagined those gold splotches as the dirt being cast over my body after I was used up and abandoned.
     Sometimes if I was afraid I was going to eat, I emptied my cabinets into a paper bag and took it to the canyon at the end of the cul-de-sac. The eucalyptus trees prevented anything else from growing, and the ground there was always dusty, even after a rain. Despite the prime location, somehow nobody had figured out how to stabilize the earth and build on it. Instead, my landlords had told me, the canyon was occupied by a colony of homeless drug dealers. It was a dangerous place for young women.
     I never saw any people, just some old beer cans. That was where I would leave my shopping bag. It was always gone by the next time I brought something to offer. Sometimes so were the beer cans.
     When I stood in my bathroom and imagined dirt thrown at my naked body, it was usually among those trees and hills that the shaming occurred. Sometimes I felt further ashamed because the idea of it was exciting, a kind of fantasy I knew I was not supposed to have. I blamed an ex who was into the Emmanuelle movies and The Story of O. The films impressed me with ideas about tops and bottoms and testing my limits to the point of destruction.
     One day my bicycle was stolen, the one I’d had since I was thirteen. I’d left it parked by my door because there was no room for it inside, and someone must have climbed over the fence and tossed it into the little parking lot that belonged to some bungalows converted to offices. The bike was only a three-speed; it can’t have sold for much. The policeman on the phone was very nice to me about it, very sympathetic; he said, That was your bike, as if he understood everything. I started to fantasize about dating him and getting my bicycle back, then feeling as I used to feel at thirteen, the temporary freedom of the bike and the way its tires both clung to the pavement and pushed me along, as I circled my suburban neighborhood.
     At Christmas, I told my parents that living under the flight path had made me afraid of flying, though really I didn’t think I was afraid of anything anymore. I stayed in the flight path for the holidays. That morning, I walked up Laurel Street, away from the airport. The buildings had left their colored lights on for the planes, their tinsel waving as if the city were a big present welcoming the passengers. I was unfestive in leggings and a T-shirt, a sweatshirt tied around my waist. The adhesions from my appendix had grown thick and stiff, all those places I could not identify but felt pulling against me as I walked. It was a pleasant little pain that encouraged me both to take care of that sore spot and also to refuse to feed it, keep it small.
     Laurel flattened out into a bridge over the freeway and into Balboa Park. The park was green in those days. There was still water to spare for grass and flowers among the cluster of whipped-creamy buildings from the old Panama-California Exposition: Museum of Man, Museum of Art, Natural History, smaller museums whose subjects kept changing. In one basement, there used to be a space for model train enthusiasts, and if you went inside on the one day a month it was open, you were surrounded by dozens of tiny worlds all predicated on ovals in continuous motion.
     The trains were not open on Christmas, but a glittery Santa’s sleigh was taking off from the center of the plaza, with reindeer climbing into the sky. Children were screaming themselves hoarse and fighting their parents, trying to climb into it. I went behind the Botanical Building and peered through a wedge of chain-link fence into the red panda exhibit in the Children’s Zoo. So much crying and outrage — I’ve found that children resent being forced to look at exotic animals, unless the animals are babies. I’d seen at my job that cartoons and books make the animals into ordinary things; children have to grow up to see how rare and sensitive an elephant is. Then they’ll take their own kids back to the zoo, but there’s always a danger that a creature they now remember fondly will have long since gone extinct. Meanwhile, a red panda looks a lot like a raccoon.
     When I turned away from that little sliver of petting zoo, I saw a family lined up behind me, multigenerational mixed races in new T-shirts and ruffled dresses. They were waiting patiently for me to move so that the fidgety children could have a turn. We wished each other a merry Christmas and I headed for home.
     I took side streets past some big interwar houses that looked like Old Hollywood. Near the corner of Fourth and Maple, an SUV pulled up. I saw myself in a dark window against a line of palms, and then the window rolled down and cut my reflection. I got a glimpse of a man, probably a nice fellow who had just dropped his wife and kids off at the zoo and was on his way home to check that the doors were locked. He leaned across the gearshift, and even though there was no plane nearby, his lips made the soundless shapes for “How much?”
     I thought then that if I gave him a number, my whole life might change or end very soon. But then an airplane did roar over the zoo, so he could not possibly have heard any answer I gave.
     I’d read that running away is dangerous. I walked fast. He followed me for a block before he realized I was not leading him to a quieter spot, and then he revved off.
     The planes roared. Inside, I thought, Maybe he parked behind the fence. Maybe he’s watching me now. I took my clothes off as if he were peering through the slats in the Venetian blinds, and I turned around. I wondered just what it was he had seen in me. I watched in the mirror as I massaged my scar. It still hurt. I lay down and did it some more, until I drifted into a long, fitful sleep.

 

*

The next morning, I called my policeman and reported a man propositioning young women near the park. One young woman, yes. No, didn’t touch me, just made me feel dirty. I had memorized his license plate…but none of this was impressive enough to make the policeman invite me downtown.
     When I hung up, I felt betrayed. And ravenous. My hunger was a poor, scarred, furious thing that would not retreat. I lay all day with it, telling it to shut up and be good and be what I needed. None of my old tricks worked; the hunger was simply there, and this time it would not retreat into a ball no matter how many times I showed it my reflection.
     I decided that I would punish the hunger with chocolate almonds and barbecue potato chips. They were the foods I most relished denying myself. So I walked to a convenience store and I bought nothing but those foods, and I spread them out over my mattress. I looked forward to not eating them, and then I ate them anyway. They were delicious.
     They were all that I ate for weeks. I expected to get fat.
     But I had just discovered the world’s greatest diet: I slimmed down. There’s only so much junk you can eat before you feel too sick to swallow again. I did not even have to make myself vomit afterward because my body refused to hold on to those calories. If only I had known this in high school…
     Finally I liked how I looked. Hungry. I was cold all the time, so I wore long-sleeved sweaters and ankle-length knit skirts. They were all very tight, because that was the fashion, and when I sat at my desk, eating chocolate and barbecue potato chips with a cold soda from the vending machines, my co-workers marveled out loud at my metabolism. My scar swum up from the flesh between my navel and my hipbone; my body sprang out in a light, downy fur. I had just a few pounds to go to reach my junior high weight.
     I wanted somebody to see me naked, so I started going out with an editor who wanted to be a writer. He called me every night and read me what he’d written that day so he could hear me say uh and uh-huh. He thought I appreciated those calls. He told me he thought I was prettier than most people said I was. He was writing about his family, one brother who was in prison and another who was on TV for being a con man.
     I thought that if I ever married, my husband would be a man like this.
     He had a long, bald head and skinny shoulders and patchy black body hair. When I invited him to my apartment, he loved the mirrors, loved seeing me naked in front of them, used to have me turn and bend so he could examine every hidden angle. He told me the scar on my belly wasn’t so bad; maybe it would fade, or when I got the money together I could have it recut and made smaller. I did not tell him how much I cherished that scar.
     We went to the nude beach by my old college, where he had me walk down to the water and back, then swim, then come out of the waves like Venus, then lie beside him on a beach towel. The sea breeze tickled my new golden pelt. Men came up to me, grubby older men with too much body hair and paunches under which sadly tiny penises barely poked out toward the light. They wanted me to rub sunscreen on their backs and I shook my head, until my date spoke up and said Why not? And then I did accept a bottle of sunscreen. I poured so much of it into my hands that I was not able to feel the stranger’s flesh while I was slathering it. When he got up, however, the tiny penis had grown, probably as big as it would get, and that made the editor angry. He sent the naked men away, all of them, and I felt both pleased to be valued and disappointed — for there had been a test here, and I’d passed, but I wanted to keep testing myself again and again.
     When we became an official couple, I began letting him undress me in his office. We dislodged clothing in the elevator, in front of the security guards’ camera. He spoke in a low voice, into my ear, telling me what people would think if they knew, if the security guards told about me, if one day I were naked in his office, on his desk, on a set of galley proofs he was going over, with my legs spread wide and pointed at the door, waiting for him to come back from a sales meeting. What would the security guards do to me? What did I want them to do?
     It was degrading, but wasn’t that the point? I got used to it, then bored, and so he got more inventive. He did his best work, making up ways for the security guards to violate me.
     And then I was fired. Human Resources called me in for a conference with my headband-and-cardigan young boss, who would not look at me, and the HR VP offered two weeks’ pay if I quit that very instant. She noted that I did not seem happy in my position. She didn’t seem to think there could be any reason for that feeling, so we did not discuss it. Nobody mentioned the editor’s office or the elevator either. Maybe they had not noticed? They seemed only to know that I was sad, and that was why I was being invited to leave. Girl staff were supposed to be friendly and upbeat and to eat regular balanced meals. My boss was a nice person; she played piano for old people on Sundays.
     HR told me to write a letter of resignation. It could contain anything I wanted to express, as long as it said I resigned. I sat down at the typewriter she offered, which was the one they used for typing tests. I typed, I want this meeting to be over. That was fine with everyone.
     I walked home. By the time I got there I was ravenous, feeling knots of sinew soldered over bone and a great spectacular hollowness. I was hot, although it was only June and overcast. I decided to start challenging myself not to eat again, even though the diet had been working so well. But when I spread the chocolate and things along the cardboard boxes that served as my nightstand, I did not want to resist anymore. I ate everything in the apartment.
     My gut bloated. I felt terrible. But during the next days, while the house was empty except for the noise of the planes, I lay on my mattress and observed my stomach flattening out again. Sometimes I rolled onto my side and watched in the mirror. The slouch of my breasts over my ribs moved me to tears with its beauty. I saw that I was breathing but otherwise not moving, and yet I felt as if I were falling down, down, down.
     For a while I was hungry, and then I was not hungry, and then hunger reawakened and unloosed a beehive in my skull. The roar kept my longing rolled into a ball, not in my stomach but in my chest, ratcheting my body tighter and tighter. The couple upstairs played their stereo and ran across the floor and tried to make a baby. When they fell asleep, and then when the planes stopped flying, the silence made my head vibrate more. Then the place started shattering. I heard glasses break in the kitchen area, one after the other, and I was glad they were broken. I wanted them to break — I was making it happen. One morning a crack appeared in a closet door; by evening it was a spiderweb.
     The editor called and wanted to go see a Mel Gibson movie. He must have known what had happened, but he also really wanted to see the movie and read me his day’s pages and then fuck me. I said I would meet him at the theater but then I didn’t.
     Instead I called up a man I used to live with and I asked him never to abandon me. He was the one who had caused the appendectomy. He was not a bad person but now he was on a date with a new girlfriend. The two of them decided to call 911, then he came over and helped the police handcuff me and get me into their car. My neighbors, all of them, came out of their houses and apartments and watched. Then the police drove me to County Mental Health. The hospital was about a mile away and still close to the flight path.
     The ex did not abandon me. He followed in his own car, and then I heard him telling the intake people that I’d been depressed since our breakup and what happened with my appendix right afterward. He said I’d offered to kill myself. I did not disagree; that would have felt impolite. I thought that they would say okay and send me back home, but when a man in a plaid shirt led me to a door, he stood aside to let me pass, and then he shut the door on me. It was locked. Inside, the staff gave me a sedative, a pink flannel nightgown, and a paper bag with a sandwich. It was about midnight.
I kept my clothes on and did not look to see what the sandwich was. When I gave it and the nightgown to my roommate, she was glad to have them. She draped my nightgown over her nightgown as a shawl, and she ate the sandwich right away; it smelled like pickles and salt. None of the inmates were sleeping because the sedatives did not work. They wandered the halls like flabby pink hams, some laughing and some making a noise like hrnt to ward away devils.
     There was a payphone where my roommate spent most of her time. Nobody limited her calls, which was surprising to me, but then I supposed that we weren’t really in prison. She was calling everyone she knew, trying to get in touch with a lover who lived on a boat in the marina. The two of them had gotten drunk, and she’d thrown the lover’s TV into the water. She explained to one of the nurses that she had just had enough, and he said he’d been there before. Sometimes you have to let off some steam. She told him she used to be married for a while and her name was still Mrs. Thighs. Then she said the police had beaten her up, but they did it invisibly so no one could tell. He said mm-hm and went off to help someone else.
     In the morning a different man in a plaid shirt asked what my plans were. I said I wasn’t going to kill myself or anyone else. He said I could add anything I wanted and he would write it down on my paperwork. I decided to be honest: if anything was going to make me kill myself, it would be having been locked up here and seen what it was like. He typed that out and let me go, which was his way of letting me know that what I’d seen had been nothing.
     My ex came to drive me home. He asked if I was mad at him and I said no. I said I was sorry I’d ruined his date, and then I changed it to interrupted.
     We walked out of the building and the first thing I did was look up for the underside of a plane. Something was about to come in; I couldn’t hear it yet, but I felt it in my bones and I knew just how it was going to look, passing over a few blocks away with its wheels creeping down.
     I didn’t realize that we were in an earthquake until I saw the parking lot ripple, like a swath of gray velvet given a shake. Every earthquake is a surprise. Car alarms went off; windows popped. It was only a medium-sized quake but it was primal. The earth was trying to suck us all in and shake us off at the same time.
     My ex and I grabbed hands. We should get to a doorway, he said. We should crawl under a car so that nothing hits us.
     I saw how scared he was and I felt bad for him.
     No, I said, I think we’re supposed to lie down in the open, away from powerlines.
     He tried to tug me in his way; I tried to pull him in mine. And while we argued over something that would not have saved our lives no matter what we decided, a plane finally did start its descent, wheels curling like talons that just might snatch us up and drop us straight into the bay.